A few nights ago, Heidi and I watched the new Downton Abbey movie, Downton Abbey: A New Era, on Peacock TV. A big Downton Abbey fan, I’ve been wanting to watch the movie for a while, but not quite enough to go see it in a movie theater. It only cost $10 to subscribe for a month to Peacock premium, the streaming service plan from NBCUniversal that’s free of commercials, which is less than the cost of one movie ticket. Plus I figured it would give us a chance to sample what else Peacock has to offer for a few weeks, something I doubt I would have done otherwise.
I loved Downton Abbey: A New Era in the way I love catching up with old friends. It really feels a fitting way for the show to end. Will it, though? With so many streaming services competing for a finite amount of viewer attention, everyone is desperate to build a catalog of “must see” shows or movies to keep their subscribers from bailing. But how many “must see” shows can there really be? Back in 2015, John Landgraf, the president of FX Networks, coined the term Peak TV, saying that with such a huge explosion in scripted content, we would begin to see a decline in quality in the following years because the talent needed to create them was spread too thin.
Did we? There’s definitely more bad stuff. There’s a huge sea of dreck, in fact. But there’s just more of everything — the good, the bad, and the vast, vast quantities of mediocre. I’ve always been fairly picky about what I watch (we dropped our cable years ago and just went with on demand entertainment, rotating through the various services depending on what’s available), but I find myself getting even pickier because of the huge selection of quality shows. When I was a kid, I would have thought The Book of Boba Fett, on Disney+, was amazing, but I still haven’t gotten around to watching the last episode. It was just . . . so-so.
I’ve got a new book out! ASK HAGAN is a collection of six short stories that originally appeared in such diverse places as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, the Los Angeles Review, Pulphouse, and Fiction River. It’s a short read, but it also won’t set you back much, so if you’re looking for some twisty tales that pack an emotional wallop (my usual fare), please consider buying it. Sooner rather than later. I have a daughter in college, you know.
Just kidding. Kind of.
Oh, and one last thing you might find interesting. The lead story (about a struggling writer who hits it big when he invents an obnoxious Ann Landers-like advice columnist named Hagan T. Stone, hence the title Ask Hagan) actually did start out as column idea. I pitched it to an editor of an edgy, genre-crossing magazine, basically saying “What if someone like Hunter S. Thompson wrote a Dear Abby column?” Hagan T. Stone would be completely made up, of course, but nobody but me and the editor would know it was me. And while the editor liked the idea, he decided it wasn’t quite the right fit. Undaunted, I even toyed with the idea of starting a website myself, going so far as obtaining a domain name before sanity (or maybe it was my wife?) thankfully prevailed.
But the idea stayed with me. Then one day I wondered what would happen if the column not only became a huge hit, but one day an imposter showed up on the scene to reap all the rewards, and before you knew it I was writing. As usual, the story went in a completely unexpected direction, with a whiz bang ending readers will hopefully enjoy as much as I did. Janet Hutchings certainly thought so when I sent it to her, buying it for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, where it appeared last year. I hope you enjoy it too.
More info below, including where you can buy it. And thanks for reading!
Ask Hagan anything. Anything at all. Even how to outwit a madman …
Once a promising young novelist with big literary dreams, John Winsley wakes up on the other side of forty as a third-rate hack with a perpetual hangover. Fueled by bitterness, he creates an obnoxious online persona as something of a lark—a funhouse version of Ann Landers named Hagan T. Stone with mad eyes, a black beard shaped like a spade, and an irreverent wit. The Ask Hagan advice column becomes a surprising worldwide hit. And it makes Winsley a very rich man.
Wracked with guilt about the wife and daughter he abandoned, Winsley feels conflicted about his anonymous success … until an imposter claiming to be Hagan T. Stone shows up to reap all the rewards. Now Winsley only has to answer one question: How far will he go to get what he deserves?
This taut, suspenseful tale kicks off Carter’s latest collection. From a mysterious elevator in an Iowa cornfield to a crowded superstore where android spouses are bought like toasters, these six provocative forays into Carter’s wide-ranging imagination never fail to surprise.
Belle, our Boston Terrier, passed away on Monday. She was fourteen. She was a faithful companion, especially to my daughter, for many years. With Rosie so much bigger and more energetic than Belle, and with my daughter away at college, Belle spent much of the past year with my in-laws, where she was heavily doted on and spent many wonderful months. As far as “lap dogs” go, she was about perfect, since she seldom wanted to be anywhere other than on someone’s lap. Like most short-snouted dogs, she could be bit . . . stinky sometimes, but then, her “tootiness,” as my family liked to call it, was part of what made her who she was, just as the clicking of her nails on our hardwood floor was also distinctively her. She will be missed!
As far as writing news, the short book that became a long book that became a shorter book again is done, as much as I ever consider a book done, but I’m letting it sit for a bit. Sometimes I do that, especially when a particular work was more of a challenge. While whether a book was easy or hard to write for me seems to have little bearing on its eventual quality or its reception from readers (you’d think it would!), a little distance from it can sometimes help me see it a bit more clearly.
I’m well into the third Karen Pantelli book, and while I’m enjoying it, I have to say that recent events in Uvalde, Texas made it harder for me to feel as enthusiastic writing in the crime fiction genre. What helps me get over that is that I love this character, and for me, for all of my stories, it’s always about character. About people. Their hopes and dreams. Their failings. I don’t write to glorify violence. I write books that sometimes deal with violence because violence is part of the world. That doesn’t mean 19 children have to die because a lonely, desperate young man self-radicalized by wallowing in hate online and thought he could make himself feel powerful by killing innocent people. That happened because the United States makes it incredibly easy for people in this country to not only own guns (far easier than almost any other modern nation), but also to own weapons of war (and an AR-15 assault rifle is a weapon of war). Countries that don’t do this, don’t have this problem, at least not even close to this magnitude.
So it’s not complicated. Better background checks and the requirement to take a class on gun safety and pass a test would help, of course, but not allowing average citizens to own weapons of war would make the biggest difference. Don’t think it will work here? It worked in Australia, and, to somewhat paraphrase The Princess Bride, that’s a country founded by criminals. And anyone who quotes the Second Amendment to me, I always say 1) it wasn’t intended the way you think it was and 2) even if it was, which it wasn’t, the Constitution was always designed to be an evolving document; otherwise black people would still be counted as 3/5th of a person, and 3) do you believe individual people should own thermonuclear weapons? To that last one, if they say no (and only a moron wouldn’t say no), then I say, “Then you already agree that while the right to bear arms should not be infringed, you do agree that there should be limits to the kind of weapons people can have. Now we’re just arguing about what those limits are.
That was bordering on a diatribe, so I’ll leave it at that, but it does illustrate how easy the arguments against sane, reasonable gun regulations are so easy to dispel with. I’m not anti-gun. Of course I’m not. But I’ll probably get a few emails now from readers telling me I should keep politics out of my writing. And to them I say this: When you tell a writer not to write anything that might be construed as political, what you’re really telling them is not to write about anything that matters, because things that matter sometimes upset people. If you’d rather only get updates on when my next book is out, avoid my blog and just subscribe to my newsletter, but I have to tell you, I’m the same kind of writer in my books as I am here. That doesn’t mean I have an ax to grind; it just means that my point of view, and my beliefs, do permeate my fiction. That is the kind of writer I want to be. It doesn’t mean I’m always right. It just means I’m at least trying to be true to myself, and if I can’t at least do that as a writer, then I’d rather not write at all.
Heidi and I took a quick jaunt to the coast last weekend, partly to celebrate my 49th birthday, staying in a fun little Airbnb right next to Yaquina Bay State Park. Amazing weather in Newport, which of course can happen anytime of the year on the Oregon coast. A little below is a shot of Rosie on the sandbar that separates Yaquina Bay from the beach. My intrepid Irish Setter and I had a great time on those dunes.
A spectacular sunset dinner at Georgie’s, a visit to Cobblestone Beach at the Yaquina Head Lighthouse at extremely low tide, and a pleasant Sunday afternoon stop at Airlie Winery, a favorite of ours, capped off a great weekend.
Hard to believe I’m approaching half a century. Looking back, I think a lot of us have an age where we feel we’ve become the person we are mentally. I think for me it was around age 27. I feel pretty much the same inside as I did twenty-two years (!!) ago. I don’t think that was even the most significant year in my life (that would probably be 1994, the year I graduated from college, started working full-time, and met the love of my life), or the year that changed me the most as a person (that would probably be 2003, when I looked down into my newborn daughter’s eyes for the first time and was never the same person again), or even a year when I knew I was getting someplace as a writer (probably 2008, when I sold my first novel to Simon and Schuster). But it’s the year when, looking back, at least, I feel most like the person I am today.
That’s also when I started having to worry a little more about whether or not to eat the cake. Before that, I could eat as much cake as I wanted and never be concerned about my weight. Now I can’t so much as post a picture of cake on my website without gaining a few pounds. I wish I was joking.
On the writing front, the short book I was working on turned into a long book which is turning back into a short book. Alas, that’s sometimes how it goes. As I mentioned last month, these days I don’t have a lot of great advice for other writers, except to put in the time and enjoy the process, whatever your process is. You’ve got to find your own way. It might be a cliche to say the work should be its own reward, but it is true. You can’t control how the world responds to your work. You can only do your best, keep challenging yourself, and trust that with time, and a little luck, the results will come.
And if the results aren’t as great as you’d hoped, whether that’s the results of a particular piece of work, or how the world responds to it, well, you’ve still got the work. The process. The art itself. The thrilling, challenging, frustrating, teasing, agonizing, amazing art itself.
Most of us don’t like to talk about luck in the arts, but if you find yourself saying nonsense like “I don’t believe in luck,” then please tell that to the eight-year-old who just lost both her parents in Ukraine because a madman in Saint Petersburg sees threats where more sane and compassionate people see opportunities. Chance is part of life. Some people get lucky, some people don’t. Without chance, life couldn’t even be; randomness, chaos, call it what you will, is also what makes life so interesting. That doesn’t mean you can’t influence how your life goes. Of course you can! Get good at what you do and give yourself as many chances as you can to get lucky. You just don’t get to predetermine the outcome. Thank God, though! Because to paraphrase Alan Watts, if you were both omnipotent and all-knowing, eventually you’d get bored and want to be surprised . . . which is life! And you can’t have meaningful surprise without real risk. To say otherwise is to engage in wishful thinking, and to talk only of the success stories is to engage in survivorship bias.
So for me these days, I just try to do my best, enjoying the process of creating — even when it’s hard. Especially when it’s hard. It’s hard because as much as I’d like to predetermine the outcome of my creative work, I can’t. Not if I want to be surprised, and sometimes through surprise great things happen. In all creative fields, I think it’s best to embrace that feeling of risk and just live in that present moment with the process as much as you can. Enjoy the fruits of your labor when they come, of course, but don’t blame yourself and beat yourself up all the time when material success proves elusive. That’s why accepting that luck does play a part can actually be very freeing. It doesn’t give license for laziness, however; you still have to do the work. But you can just do the work and surrender yourself to the outcome, knowing that you did your best in that moment in time.
Since I mentioned Alan Watts, one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers (or as he liked to think of himself, as a philosopher-entertainer), I’ll finish off this post with a quote from The Wisdom of Insecurity that encapsulates what I’m getting at. I think it’s one of the most profound things he’s written, and it’s probably no surprise that this book is still selling well (Amazon lists it as a bestseller in its category) some seventy years after it’s original publication.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can go find some cake . . .
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.
I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.
If happiness always depends on something expected in the future, we are chasing a will-o’-the-wisp that ever eludes our grasp, until the future, and ourselves, vanish into the abyss of death.
The art of living … is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
We are living in a culture entirely hypnotized by the illusion of time, in which the so-called present moment is felt as nothing but an infinitesimal hairline between an all-powerfully causative past and an absorbingly important future. We have no present. Our consciousness is almost completely preoccupied with memory and expectation. We do not realize that there never was, is, nor will be any other experience than present experience. We are therefore out of touch with reality. We confuse the world as talked about, described, and measured with the world which actually is. We are sick with a fascination for the useful tools of names and numbers, of symbols, signs, conceptions and ideas.
Tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live.
